Reading Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea , livre ebook

Reading Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea
READING HEMINGWAY SERIES
MARK CIRINO, EDITOR
ROBERT W. LEWIS, FOUNDING EDITOR
Reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
H. R. Stoneback
Reading Hemingway’s Men Without Women
Joseph M. Flora
Reading Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees
Mark Cirino
Reading Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not
Kirk Curnutt
Reading Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea
Bickford Sylvester, Larry Grimes, and Peter L. Hays
Reading Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea
GLOSSARY AND COMMENTARY
Bickford Sylvester, Larry Grimes, and Peter L. Hays

The Kent State University Press
KENT, OHIO
© 2018 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2018008753
ISBN 978-1-60635-342-4
Manufactured in the United States of America
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Sylvester, Bickford, 1925- author. | Grimes, Larry E. (Larry Edward), 1942- author. |
Hays, Peter L., 1938- author.
Title: Reading Hemingway’s The old man and the sea : glossary and commentary / Bickford
Sylvester, Larry Grimes, and Peter L. Hays.
Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, [2018] | Series: Reading
Hemingway series ; 5 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018008753 | ISBN 9781606353424 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961. Old man and the sea.
Classification: LCC PS3515.E37 O5294 2018 | DDC 813/.52--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008753
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Dedicated to
B RUCE L. G RENBERG
by his colleague and friend
Bickford Sylvester
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction to The Old Man and the Sea
Abbreviations for the Works of Ernest Hemingway Used in This Book
Series Note
Pages 5 through 27
Pages 28 through 43
Pages 44 through 53
Pages 54 through 77
Pages 78 through 96
Pages 97 through 106
Pages 107 through 119
Pages 120 through 127
Works Cited
Index
PREFACE
This is a book by three hands. Most of it was written by Bickford Sylvester, longtime Hemingway scholar, who died on 24 July 2014. Bick was a World War II veteran, musician, soccer enthusiast, and—significant for this book—deep-sea fisherman and salmon guide in Alaska, British Columbia, Canada, and northwest Washington state where he lived. He sailed the open ocean, as Santiago did; he knew currents and wind patterns; and he knew fish—but salmon, not marlin. His research into The Old Man and the Sea began long ago for his 1966 articles in PMLA and Modern Fiction Studies , continued through his contribution to Scott Donaldson’s Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway (1996), and lasted until shortly before his death, with the publication of Hemingway, Cuba, and the Cuban Works (2014), which had to be completed by Larry Grimes. A generous scholar, Bick often put his own work aside to help others, as he did when he shelved work on this book to edit Morris Buske’s book Hemingway’s Education: A Re-examination (Mellen, 2007), after Buske’s death. Throughout his work, Bick was supported by his wife, helpmate, and chief proofreader, Barbara. Before his own death, Bick asked Peter Hays and Larry Grimes to finish his work, and we have, to the best of our abilities.
The Old Man and the Sea mentions Santiago’s “hard-braided” line ( 15:5 ). The three hands pulling these annotations together sometimes tugged in slightly different directions, but we have striven to construct a seamless text and an informative one, a hard-braided one. We have also worked to weave together various strains of interpretation. First, there is the factual base of wind and water that Bick knew, fishing and fishes, which we all researched and got wonderful help from university types, a Cuban journalist, Wikipedia , and even Sea World biologists. Next is the various allusions and symbols, the Christian being most apparent: saints’ names—James (Santiago), Peter, and Martin—and references to the Passion of Christ. There are also obvious references to baseball, and a detailed knowledge of the game both dates the novella and explains other aspects. Less obvious are the allusions to the Afro-Cuban religion that we know as Santeria, that Santiago also acknowledges, perhaps practices, and that Hemingway includes in his novella. There also seem to be references to Friedrich Nietzsche and his philosophy of the autonomous individual, as well as references to the Grail myth and the Fisher King. Finally, and pervasively, there is a theme of what might be called mysticism or, perhaps, ecological awareness together with a sense of one’s purpose in that ecology: Santiago bonds with certain aspects of nature early on—the white peaks of mountains in the Canaries and the lions he sees playing on the beaches of Africa. He identifies with creatures in the ocean, particularly the marlin that he paradoxically respects and kills. Those paradoxes play throughout the work, sometimes pulling in different directions (like the three contributors to this book): Christianity against Santeria, Christianity against Nietzscheism and against nature red in tooth and claw, where one may be imbued with love for all things but still kill to live, where we have to recognize limits to our compassion and charity. But Christianity itself has its internal paradoxes, such as a three-person God or a death that confers life.
Paradoxes are part of The Old Man and the Sea . Mysteries are not solved. And in not doing so, Hemingway has captured life with its myriad influences and, as seen by others, multiple meanings. His novella inspired millions of readers and innumerable interpretations. We cannot say one interpretation is the only correct one, for many are possible. What we have tried to do is provide the facts of the ocean, the marlin and the sharks, and Cuban fishing, and to identify as many of the possible allusions and connections as we could. Interpretation, as always in Hemingway, is up to the reader, as catching the fish is up to the person holding the line, hard-braided, from many different strands and sources.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, and most important of all, we thank our wives—Carol Grimes and Myrna Hays—whose love and support made our research, writing, and editing possible as we undertook the challenge of completing the work of our friend and colleague Bick Sylvester, who spent much of his life on The Old Man and the Sea and at least the last twenty years of his life on this book, which is largely his. Also owed thanks is Bick’s wife, helpmeet, and proofreader, Dr. Barbara Sylvester.
We also wish to acknowledge the invaluable help of Raúl Villarreal, Ismael León Almeida, Dr. D. Duane Cummins, the audiovisual archivists who curate the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, and Jeffrey and Nancy Seglin, who provided generous hospitality to wandering scholars. We especially wish to thank Duane Raver for his painting of the marlin and Kay Smith for her cover painting.
We are grateful for the many specialists—on everything from arm wrestling to heart conditions, from marine biology to ophthalmology—who provided expertise as it was needed. Finally, we acknowledge the Edward A. Dickson Award (University of California, Davis) for making publication of the color images possible.
INTRODUCTION TO
THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA
The seed for The Old Man and the Sea was planted long before the book was written out fully. In Hemingway’s essay “On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter,” published in Esquire in 1936, he recounts a story told to him by his boat pilot, Carlos Gutíerrez. It begins,
Another time an old man fishing alone in a skiff out of Cabañas hooked a great marlin that, on the heavy sashcord handline, pulled the skiff far out to sea. Two days later the old man was picked up by fishermen sixty miles to the eastward, the head and forward part of the marlin lashed alongside. What was left of the fish, less than half, weighed eight hundred pounds. ( BL 239)
The remainder of the account describes the shark attack and the old man’s condition when rescued. The long paragraph provides the narrative outline of the action in The Old Man and the Sea . Figure 1 pictures Hemingway and Carlos in 1936 with a blue marlin.

Fig. 1. Hemingway and Carlos in 1936 with a blue marlin, the type of fish Santiago catches. (Courtesy Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston)
The story Carlos told occurred much earlier than 1936. According to Cuban Hemingway specialist Mary Cruz, such a story was printed in La Habana Elegante , 28 June 1891. The article on marlin fishing in the Gulf Stream, written by famous Cuban novelist Ramón Meza, details the daily routine of simple fishermen like Santiago. What Meza describes anticipates details in Gutíerrez’s story, much as Gutíerrez’s story forecasts The Old Man and the Sea . What is most striking about Meza’s article is that what some have seen to be a romanticized exceptionalism depicted in Santiago was the common experience of those who ventured out in fishing skiffs. Meza writes, “Man must employ all his experience and skill in that struggle where he is the weakest because he is out of his element…. The line must be let out and pulled in in brief and precise instances…. When the fisherman manages to pull the fish close to the boat, the danger increases…. [T]he fisherman makes sure to kill it by stabbing it with his harpoon. A bitter struggle ensues, often in the dark of night” (Cruz 168–70, translated by Mary Delpino). According to Cruz, Hemingway told a story lived many times over by Cuban fishermen, one that may have taken on a certain formulaic shape by the time Gutíerrez told it to the author. Hemingway’s retelling grows the narrative from its roots in the daily round, from its shape as a folk/fishing story into a finely crafted, numinous fiction ri